You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Lawrence J. Brown's Intersubjective Processes and the Unconscious is a description of field theory from a Freudian/Kleinian/Bionian perspective. His book will be of interest to interpersonal and relational analysts because of this overlap between his views and theirs, but these potential readers will also be dismayed by Brown's failure to address interpersonal and relational field theory.
Before I offer some detail about what Brown has not included, though, let me acknowledge Brown's recognition that relational theories of intersubjectivity preexisted his own Kleinian/Bionian/Freudian conception of such a theory (pp. 9–10). Even in Brown's single paragraph of acknowledgment, however, there is no recognition at all of the interpersonal contribution, which came first, prior even to the substantial relational literature. Nor is there acknowledgment of the fact that one might well also consider Kohut's self psychology a variety of field theory.
But this?enlrg very brief recognition of relational forms of intersubjectivty does not lead Brown to treat relational theory, or any of the other earlier forms of field theory that lie outside his own theoretical range, as intellectual and clinical predecessors. Brown seems to make this choice largely because he does not accept that interpersonal and relational
psychoanalysts are as committed to the place of the unconscious in psychic life as Freudian/Kleinian/Bionian analysts are.
Of course, we would all agree that Brown's description of unconscious processes is not typically interpersonal or relational, but that fact does not imply that relational analysts are any less interested in the unconscious than is Brown himself. But Brown implies just that—that is, that relational analysts are less interested in unconscious processes than he is—when he explicitly contrasts his own view of intersubjectivity to relational views of the same phenomenon on the grounds that his own intention (as opposed to that of relationalists) “is to stay focus